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Archiving on the rise

Partly because of increased data retention activity, companies are increasingly implementing disk-based archiving tiers in their storage architectures. This is a better place to retain data than tape backup systems, Babineau says, because the data is indexed, searchable and stored in single-instance format, all of which makes it easier to find what you need during e-discovery.

According to Robert Stevenson, managing director of storage research at The InfoPro, archiving tiers have seen a 54 percent annual growth rate among users surveyed vs. 20 percent for Tier 1 monolithic storage and 40 percent growth for Tier 2 modular storage. Tier 1 tends to include high-performance storage platforms, with integrated capabilities for replication, disaster recovery and minimum downtime, he says. Tier 2 includes modular systems with lower cache and disk capabilities, lower cost per terabyte and an emphasis on ease of use, Stevenson adds.

And in the past three years, e-mail archiving has grown, with 48 percent of survey respondents saying they use it today vs. 39 percent two and a half years ago. Database archiving is also up, with 36 percent using it vs. 21 percent two and a half years ago.

At East Carolina, Zimmer has reduced primary storage costs by 40 percent to 50 percent by moving data to the Centera devices.

Another reason for archiving growth is that companies are relying less on backup tapes for retention and more on disk-based storage. "Discovery is a difficult task, and if you have multiple copies in the backup environment, it's extremely expensive to retrieve, index, search and take it through the preproduction process of culling and narrowing down results," Merryman says. "It can turn discovery into a multimillion-dollar project."

Zimmer says that before East Carolina used a Centera disk array, the university relied on tape backups for data retention. But since backups collect data in daily snapshots, he says, there was always the potential for data to be missing. For instance, if the relevant information wasn't on the server the day the snapshot was taken, a user wouldn't be able to produce it. And even if the data could be found on tape, he says, the cost would be extremely high to restore it, especially if you needed to go back a year or more.

"You could potentially be working on gathering that information for a week or two, just to get to a certain piece of e-mail to restore to tape for the test lab to extract," he says. In fact, while researching the return on investment of Enterprise Vault, Zimmer estimated that it would take 80 man-hours to recover all the e-mail generated by one employee for one year if it had to be restored from every monthly backup tape. With the archive system, it takes just 15 to 20 minutes, and the employee is guaranteed to get every piece of e-mail, he says.